If the universe is created with a bang but no one is around to witness it, does it still make a sound? Some 13.7 billion years later, Dr. Mark Whittle, a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, says yes.

Four and a half months after he seemed to doom the Hubble Space Telescope by ending maintenance missions by the space shuttle, NASA's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, brought brighter news to astronomers on Tuesday by announcing that NASA was seeking...

In Shakespeare's ''Julius Caesar,'' the title character declares, ''But I am constant as the Northern Star, of whose true fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament.'' In modern astronomical terms, Caesar was saying that he was...